IbyWilliam Zinsser

ABOUT JHE AUTHOR

.,iWiltiom K. Zinsser (b, 1922), Americon critic ond writer,

r- .-ros born in.NewYork ond educoted ot.Princeton, He

hos written orticles for mony [eoding mogozines ondnewspopers ond outhored 17 books. He hos toughtwritiRg ot Yote University, the New School, ond CotUmbioUniversity Groduote School.

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I like "&opout" as an addition to tte Arherican Dream language becauseit's brief and it's clear. What I don't like is that we use it almost Jntiiely as adirty word.

. We only apply it to people under twenry-one. Yet an adult who spends hisdays and nights watching mindless TV programs is more ofa dropout than aneighteen-year-old who quits gollege, with its frequently mindless iourses, tobecome, say, a VISTA volunteer. For the young, dropping out is often a way of&opping in.

To hold this opinion, however, is little short oftreason in America. A boyor girl wholeaves college is branded a failure-and the righi to fail is one of ,

ttre few freedoms that this country does not grant its citizens. The AmericanDream is a drearh ofigetting ahead," paintedin strokes ofgold whereverwe look. Our advertisements and TV cdmmercials are a hymn to materialsuccess, our magazine articles a toast to people who made it to the top. Smokethe right cigarette or drive the right car-so the ads imply-and girls-will ; .' be swo6ning into your deodorized arms or caressing your expeniive hpels.Happiness goes to the man who has the sweet smell of achievement. He is ouriational idol, and everybody else is our national 6nk ,

I want to put ifl a rdord for the fink, especially the teen-age fink, becauseif we give him time to get through his finkdom-if we releqse him from thepressuie ofattaining certain goals by a ceitain age-he hai a good chance ofbecoming our national idol, a Jeffqrson or a Thoreau, a Buckniinster Fuller oran Adlai Stevenson, a man with a mind of his own. We need mavericks anddissenJers and dreamers far more thnq we need junior vice presidents, but weparalyze them by insisting that wery step be a step up to the next rung of theladder. Yet in the fluid years ofyouth, the only way for boys and girls to findtheir proper road is often to take a hundred side trips, ppking out in dilferentdirections, faltering, drawing back, and starting again.

GRAMMA#SAGEA short sentence often oddspunch to on ideo, especiolly

.if it comes betweenlonger, rdore coripticstedsentences, Notice how,zinsser uses o three-word

sentence to reinforce themoin pgint of his essoy:

"Foiture iln't fotol." The

sentence is direct, simple,

ond short, which gives

it extro ottention. Try

working short sentences .

strotegicqlly into your ownwriting.t

"But what if we fail?' they aslc whispering the dreadfii wordacross the '

Generation Gap to their parents, who ari back home at the Establishment

. nursing their 'middle-class values" and cultiYating their "goal oriented

societyi' The parents whisper baclc 'Dorlt!"

what they ihould say is 'Dont be afraid to fail!" Failqre isrfr fatal'

Countless people have had a bout with it and come out stronger as a result'

Many have even come out fumous. History is strewn with emin:r.lt droPouts'

"loaJrf who followed their own trail, .not worrying about its odd twists and

tums because thev had faith in their own sense 'of direction' To read their

biographies is alwap exhilarating not only because they beat th€ system' but .

b..iur" th"i, *yrt.m was better fran the one.that they beat' Luckil-y' such rebels

still turn up often enough to prove ttrat in&vidualism, thopghtadly threatene4

is qot e)rfi;ct Much haibeen wrlttett, for inStance, about the fiffirl scholastic

career of Thomas P. F. Hoving, New York! former Parla Commissioner and

now director of the Metropof,tan Museurn of Art' Hovin| was a dropout's

dropout, entering and leaving schools as ifthey were motels' often at the

,"qi"rt ofth" -in"g"ment. 5t L he must have learned somethi4g durin$ those

q.r'o.thodo* y"ur., fJr he dropped in again at the top ofhis profession'

. His case remi4ds me of another boyhood-that of Holden Caulfield in '

f. D. Salingert The Catcher in the Rye, the most popular literary hero ofthe

postrvar plriod. there is nothing accidental about the grip that this droPout'.o.rtirrues

to hold on the afectiJns of an entire Americari geneqation' Nobody

else, rEal or invented, has made such an engaging shambles ofour "goal-

oriented socie$j' so. qratified our secret beliefthat the."phonies' are in power

*a tt "

g.oa guy. ui the creek Whether Holden has also reached the top of

tri, .t o.!" n.ia iodal is one of those speculations that delight fancigrs

of good

frction I speculate that he has. Holden Caulfield, incidentally, is now thirty-six'

I'm not urghg everyone to go out and fail just ior the-sheer therapy of it'or to ouit co[Jee i-ust to coddle iome vague discontent' Obviously itt better

to to..".a tr,"i t6 flop, and in general along education is more helpfirl than a

.iort o"". (ffr-f." to^-y orn t Idu""tlon, foi example, I can tellGeorge Eliot

from T. S: Eliot, I can handle the pluperfect tense in French, and I know that

Caesar beat the Helvetii because he fiad enough frumentum') I only mean

that failure isrft bad in itself, or success automatically good'

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Fred Zinnemann, who has directed some qf Hollywoodt most honored

. movies, was asked by a reporter, when A Man foi All SeasoT s $ron every

prize, about his pt"t ioot fil*, Brho ld a Pale Horse, which was a box-office

dis".i"r. "I doot f.el any obligation to be successfrili Zimmerman repted"

'success can be dangerous-you feel you know it all' IVe learned a great

deal from mv failures.' A simiar point was made by Richard Brooks about

his ambitious mon ey loset, Lord iim. Reialling the three years of his life that

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went into it, talking almost },!,ith elation about the troublcs that befell his.unitin Cambodia, Brooks told me that he learned more about his craft from this'considerable

failure than from his many earlier hits.

Itt a point, ofcourse, that applies throughout the arts. Writers, .

playwrights, painters and composers work in the erpectation ofperiodicdefeat; lut they wouldnt keep going back into the arena if they tlought it wasthe end ofthe world. It isnt the end oithe wcrld. For an artist_andlerhapsfor anybody-it is the only way to grow.

Todayt younger generation seems to know that this is true, seems willingto take the risks in life that artists take in art. "societyi needless to say, still -has the upper hand-it sets the goals and condemns as a failure everybodywho wont play. But the dropouts and the hippies are not as afraid offailureas their parents and grandparents. This could mean, aq their elders might say,that they are just plumb lary, sec,ure in the comforts of an afiluent stati Itcould also mean, however, that they just dont buy the old standards of success

' and are rapidly writing new ones.

Recently it was :innormced, for instance, that more than two hundredthousand Americans have inquired about sen ice in VISTA (the domesticPeace Corps) and that, according to a Gallup srrrvey, "more than 3 millionAmerican college students would serve VISTA in some capacity ifgiven ,

the opportunity: this is hardly the road to riches or to an executive suite.Yet-I havemet many ofthese young volunteers, and they are not pining fortraditional success. On the contrary, they appear more fulfilled than the ,

average vice-president with a swimmi"g poot

Who is to say, then, ifthere is any righf path to the top, or even tosay what thi top consists ofi Obviouily the iolleges doritiave more than apartial answer-othetwisg the young would not 6e so disafected with aneilucation that they consider vapid. Obviously business does ni:t havethe answer-otherwise the young would not te so scornfirl of

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its call to be an organization man.

The fact is, riobody has the answer,and the dawning awareness ofthis fuctseems to me one of the best thingshappening in America today.Success and failure are againbecoming individual visions, asthey were when the country wasyounger, not rigid categories. Maybewe are learning again to cherish this

Irighf ofevery person to succedd on his ownterms and to fail as often as necessary along the way.

Unit 1 . TheAmericon Dreom 89

Complete the fottowinq SOAPSTone toonolyze the essoy "The Iight to

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